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Monthly Archives: April 2013

When FRONTLINE filmmaker Olly Lambert sat to interview Jamal Maarouf, a Syrian rebel commander, he did not anticipate that bombs from government jets would begin to fall just 300 meters away.

Though the first blast knocked him to the ground, Lambert kept his camera rolling. He spent the next hour documenting the impacts of the Oct. 28, 2012 bombing of al-Bara, a village in Idlib province an hour south of Aleppo. The result is a rare, immersive portrait of the immediate aftermath of Syrian government air strikes on a civilian population.

Watch the full-length episode athttp://video.pbs.org/video/2364993210/ (US Only)http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontli… [Warning: Graphic violence] On Oct. 28, 2012, while FRONTLINE’s Olly Lambert was filming an interview with a Syrian rebel leader in the village of al-Bara, a regime airstrike hit barely 300 meters from where he was standing. He kept the cameras rolling, spending the next hour documenting the strike’s impact. This film, narrated by Lambert, is a rare, immersive portrait of the immediate aftermath of Syrian government air strikes on civilian populations.

Lambert is the first Western filmmaker to spend an extended period living on both sides of Syria’s war – and to document, on camera, the realities of everyday life for rebels, government soldiers and the civilians who support them. Lambert’s film, Syria Behind the Lines, airs Tuesday April 10 on PBS.

The Syrian national ID card includes its holder’s ancestral name and “place of origin,” i.e., the neighborhood and city most closely associated with his or her family name. Before the uprising, the ID card caused the kind of minor travel-related annoyances we’re accustomed to in the West. But in the past 20 months, the ID card has become a potent tool for profiling and weeding out suspected members of the opposition. If you get stopped at a checkpoint, being from a rebel city or neighborhood can mean the difference between life and death. And while an individual’s religion isn’t blatantly listed on the ID, most officials can make a pretty good guess about a citizen’s sect based on the information.

Syria has a long history of using citizenship restrictions to decide who’s in and who’s out. In 1962, the state arbitrarily revoked the citizenship of 120,000 Kurds. These Kurds and their descendants were all considered ajanib (stateless) until last May. Ajanib are not permitted to marry, own cars, rent houses, or possess national IDs. Below the ajanib are the maktoumeen (hidden)—those who live in stateless limbo, unable to leave Syria legally but also forbidden from getting a job.

After oppressing the separatist Kurds for decades, three weeks after the uprising Assad issued an amnesty, giving them full citizenship. This conspicuously timed move was a cynical political bid to keep the armed Kurds from allying with the opposition. It worked; the Kurds have become a third position of sorts, quietly laying the foundations for their own autonomous Kurdish revolution in the North while the FSA and the regime slaughter each other.

Even if you’re not against the regime, your ID can be used to punish you if you don’t take good care of it. This fall, the regime released 267 people from prison who had been found with broken ID cards. In recent months, a firebrand Syrian sheikh has been calling for Syrians to break their ID cards to protest the regime. One man told Agence France-Presse that he had been on his way home when security forces stopped him and found his ID card broken. Another unlucky soul told AFP, “They beat me and forced me to confess that I was following the sheikh’s instructions, which I didn’t know existed.” When these Syrians were released, their heads were shaved, and they bore signs of torture. The lesson is to take good care of your driver’s license, especially if you live under a paranoid-schizophrenic wartime regime.

1. INTRODUCTION

Syria is situated in the northwestern part of the Arabian Peninsula. It occupies an area of about 185,000 km2. The Syrian territory borders Jordan on the south, Iraq on the east, Turkey on the north and Lebanon and the Mediterranean on the west (Fig.IV-1).